Media Studies

Origin & History of “entropy”

The termentropy was coined (as entropie) in 1865 by the German physicist Rudolph Clausius (1822–1888), formulator of the second law of thermodynamics. It was he who developed the concept of entropy (a measure of the disorder of a system at atomic or molecular level), and he created the name for it (on the model of energy) from Greek en- ‘in’ and tropḗ ‘turning, transformation’ (source of Englishtrophy and tropical). The firstrecord of the English version of the word is from 1868.